{"id":4655,"date":"2014-09-05T22:11:46","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T22:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/?p=4655"},"modified":"2020-06-20T22:38:52","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T22:38:52","slug":"the-context-of-paulis-typings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/2014\/09\/the-context-of-paulis-typings\/","title":{"rendered":"The Context of Pauli\u2019s Typings"},"content":{"rendered":"

“What is decisive [in] me is that I dream<\/em> about physics as [others] think<\/em> about physics. … I simply cannot<\/em> evade it!” – Pauli:\u00a0Personal Letter to Fierz,\u00a0<\/em>26 November 1949<\/p>\n

By Ryan Smith<\/strong><\/p>\n

We have managed to stitch together most (possibly all) of the eminent physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s type assessments and have added them\u00a0to the site. Pauli was a scientific genius and a personal friend of Jung – it might even be that Pauli influenced Jung’s type assessment of Plato<\/a>.\u00a0But\u00a0his method of determining type\u00a0requires some explanation.<\/p>\n

\"pauli_portrait\"<\/a>Rather than using Jung’s typology psychologically, as we do on the site, Pauli used Jung’s concepts to order philosophers and scientists into categories that he deemed (S)T ‘Trinitarian’ or NF ‘Quaternarian.’ He did so on the basis of their thinking.<\/p>\n

However, this is not to say that Pauli was merely using Jung’s typology epistemologically, as type enthusiasts who are also interested in\u00a0philosophy often do (i.e. lacking psychological acumen, they type the philosophy instead of the philosopher<\/a>). Pauli made use of an in-between approach: He\u00a0did<\/em> type scientists and philosophers\u00a0on the basis of their thinking, but rather than going by the specific contents<\/em> of their thinking, he went by whether a given thinker\u00a0was a hard systematist (ST) or\u00a0open to\u00a0the irrational totality of reality (NF).<\/p>\n

To Pauli, the ‘Trinitarian’ (S)T thinkers were the ones who had little\u00a0sense of the absolute<\/a>.\u00a0By a combination of Sensation and Thinking they proposed strictly rational models that\u00a0exclude the irrational, the ineffable, and the sublime. Trinitarian thinkers\u00a0may hear talk of the irrational and the absolute, but they are quick to dismiss it as nonexistent.<\/p>\n

In Pauli’s view, ‘Quaternarian’ thinkers are the ones who\u00a0reach an understanding of the irrational wholeness of the real\u00a0through a blend\u00a0of Feeling and Intuition. Though they may grant that the irrational is scientifically inexpressible, they nevertheless see the value of the irrational as a “background process” that may inspire their science.<\/p>\n

One interesting feature of Pauli’s thinking is how it presents a bridge between hard science and non-science. The scientific view of the world is widely agreed to be non-exhaustive<\/a>. Because science can’t make sense of everything, this leads certain thinkers to inject whatever personal beliefs they have into the gaps of our scientific knowledge, or even to make empirical claims that can<\/em> be contradicted by science (e.g. astrology).<\/p>\n

Obviously such a\u00a0postulating “God of the gaps” approach is bound to be dissatisfying to the critical scientist. But what is so unique about Pauli, as far as top-ranking scientists go, is that he was also dissatisfied with the merely rationalistic, system-building approach. That is why Pauli, after conducting extensive studies in the contrasts between the rationalistic Kepler and the mystical Fludd, concluded:\u00a0“I myself am not only Kepler but also Fludd.”<\/p>\n

Pauli perceived himself as trapped between psychology and physics, between intuitive feeling and scientific thinking, and between mysticism and science. He would hardly have entertained anti-scientific conjectures such as astrology or specific theological doctrines alleged to be hiding in the gaps of scientific knowledge. But he had a sense of the ineffable<\/a> that guided his scientific thinking and, among other things, led him to formulate ingenious scientific predictions like the existence of the neutrino – a prediction he made some\u00a012 years ahead of its actual empirical\u00a0discovery.<\/p>\n

In Pauli’s view, this same conflict between the exclusively rational and the inclusively irrational that he felt within himself was also found in the differences between\u00a0Indian and Western philosophy. With few exceptions, Pauli saw European philosophers as formulating strict rationalistic systems which shut out the\u00a0transcendental, while he experienced the Indian philosophers, indeed the entire Indian way of life, as much more open\u00a0to experiencing the ineffable\u00a0wholeness of existence:<\/p>\n

“During his time in India …\u00a0[Pauli] was struck particularly by the prominent rhythm symbolism of Indian culture, which appears, for example, in conceptions of the periodic creation and decline … of the world. This rhythm may be described as form in motion and is symbolized by, among other things, Shiva’s dance. Pauli observed that [there was a]\u00a0total absence of a rhythmic aspect [in the West]. Quite simply, he said [it] could not provide an adequate expression for his unconscious.” \u00a0–\u00a0Gieser: The Innermost Kernel <\/em>(Springer 2005) p. 319<\/p>\n

To Pauli, it was not enough to believe in philosophy or science as a set of static and speculative ideas. One must live<\/em> one’s philosophy – it must be a spiritual quest that engages with the unconscious and the irrational elements of the psyche, or it is no philosophy at all. No wonder, then, that he found himself fascinated with the mode of thought that had prevailed in India:<\/p>\n

“Western philosophical systems, with a few exceptions, are speculative in character. Being mere playthings of imagination, they do not necessarily lead to a spiritual discipline. … No Indian philosophical system is merely speculative. Each is … an insight into the real which is at once a path of perception and cessation of pain.” –\u00a0Murti: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism<\/em>\u00a0(Munshiram Monoharlal 2013)\u00a0<\/span>p. 30<\/p>\n

In Pauli’s view, Western science had been\u00a0(S)T \u2018Trinitarian\u2019 all the way from the days of Kepler and Newton and right up to Einstein. Yet as he saw it, the discovery\u00a0of quantum physics in the early 20th century was a wake-up call that told scientists that they could no longer exclude the irrational from their studies. Like Jung, Pauli thought that the advent\u00a0of\u00a0quantum physics had finally necessitated the re-introduction of the irrational<\/a> into the very heart\u00a0of science.<\/p>\n

Quantum Physics and Types<\/strong><\/p>\n

“When rational methods in science reach a dead end, a new lease of life is given to those contents that were pushed out of\u00a0time consciousness in the 17th century and sank into the unconscious.” – Pauli, quoted in Miller:\u00a0Deciphering the Cosmic Number<\/em>\u00a0(W. W. Norton 2010) chapter 5<\/p>\n

To Jung, the concept of a trinity was an artificial, hard, and ‘forced’ construction, which always excluded some element of the natural wholeness which he saw as synonymous with the number four<\/a>. In the case of Christianity, for example, Jung saw the trinity as excluding the feminine element from spiritual wholeness.<\/p>\n

This observation of Jung’s was carried over into the theory of types where the whole type is characterized by\u00a0four functions, but where the fourth\u00a0function is excluded from consciousness and suppressed. Hence we become ‘artificial’ as we differentiate ourselves out of the absolute and adapt to life as\u00a0a type. If we did not suppress\u00a0certain\u00a0functions, we\u00a0would not have superior ones either, and the question of types would be naught.<\/p>\n

For Pauli’s part, he saw this same pattern\u00a0repeated\u00a0in the domain of quantum physics. There is a popular physicist’s joke that runs as follows:\u00a0“Heisenberg was out driving and got\u00a0pulled over\u00a0by a policeman. ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ asked the policeman. Heisenberg replied: ‘No, but I know where I am.'”<\/p>\n

The joke alludes to the fact that in order to measure the velocity of a quantum particle with exactitude, we must exclude information about its position from our measurements\u00a0and\u00a0vice versa<\/em>. In the same way, Jungian functions are antinomic in character, so in order to experience\u00a0reality from the\u00a0perspective of Fi, you must exclude Te and vice versa<\/em>\u00a0(and so on and so on for the rest of the functions). Thus Pauli saw Jung’s modes of psychological adaption (types) repeated (and seemingly confirmed) in the structure of quantum physics, stating that after the discovery of quantum physics “physicists are now obliged …\u00a0\u00a0[not to] eliminate the unconscious in their statistical investigations.”<\/p>\n

\"rutherford-atom\"<\/a>Another aspect where\u00a0Pauli saw the theory of types\u00a0mirrored in the discipline of quantum physics was with regards to Bohr’s model of the atom. In 1913 Bohr had proposed a model of the atom as visually resembling the solar system, and he had proposed a way for scientists to calculate the position of an electron within an atom by use of three quantum numbers. This process can be compared to how it is possible to locate an object in a room by way of three mundane numbers: (1)\u00a0The distance of the object from\u00a0a wall on the\u00a0\u00a0length-side of the room, (2) the distance of the object from a wall on the breadth-side of the room, and (3) the distance of the object from the ceiling or floor. With these three numbers, it should be possible to locate the object’s exact coordinates, just as it would allegedly be possible to locate an electron’s trajectory.<\/p>\n

However, Bohr’s model was eventually found\u00a0to be incomplete: For one thing it couldn’t explain why electrons don’t\u00a0just settle into the same quantum state. To this end, Pauli and other physicists postulated the necessity of a fourth quantum number, the particle’s fourth\u00a0property which cannot<\/em> be visualized in accordance with Bohr’s basic model. To Pauli, this discovery confirmed that\u00a0when three becomes four (or when the inferior function is admitted into consciousness as a full function in its own right), the whole ordered rational understanding collapses.<\/p>\n

Today we might not ascribe any importance to such parallelisms, but Pauli certainly did. Unlike Jung, who purposefully dabbled in mysticism, Pauli asserted that there was no “advance conscious intention for me to grapple with figuring out the [archetypal<\/span>] problem of three and four. Consequently I am rather certain that\u00a0objectively<\/em> there is an important psychological and perhaps natural philosophical problem connected with these numbers.”<\/p>\n

Pauli’s Trinitarian thinkers are the ones who are quick to center on what they think is the truth, while his Quaternarian thinkers are the ones who are never satisfied with their discoveries, always looking to bring even more of the irrational wholeness of existence into full view.<\/p>\n

Pauli\u2019s (S)T \u2018Trinitarian\u2019\u00a0Types:<\/b><\/p>\n